He had been in New York about ten days when he awoke one morning near
noon. An immense languor possessed him. He had been with Julia the night
before and never had she been more charming, more abandoned.… He ordered
his breakfast to be sent up, and then stretched out in bed and lit an
expensive Russian cigarette. He had that love of sensuous indolence,
which, together with its usual complement, the capacity for brief but
violent action, marked him as a primitive man—one whom the regular labors
and restraints of civilization would never fit.
His telephone bell rang, and when he took down the receiver he heard
Julia’s voice. It was not unusual for her to call him about this time, but
what she told him now caused a blank and hapless look to come over his
face. She was not in her room, but in another hotel.
“My husband got in this morning,” she explained in a voice that was thin
with misery and confusion. “I got his message last night, but I didn’t
tell you because I knew it would spoil our last time together, and I was
afraid you would do something foolish.… Please say you’re not angry. You
know there was nothing for it. We couldn’t have done any of those wild
things you talked about. I’ll always love you, honestly I will. Won’t you
even say goodby?…”
He at last did say goodby and hung up the receiver and went across the
room and sat in an armchair. It suddenly struck him that he was very
tired. He had not realized it before … how tired he was. There was none of
the mad rebellion in him now that had filled him when first she had run
away from him. Although he had never acknowledged it to himself he had
been more than half prepared for this. He had told himself that he was
going to do something bold and decisive, but he had procrastinated; he had
never really formed a plan.
Weariness was his leading emotion. He was spent, physically and
emotionally. He wanted her almost as much as ever. While she was no longer
the remote and dazzling star she had been, the bond of flesh that had been
created between them seemed a stronger, a more constant thing than
blinding unsatisfied desire. But a great despair possessed him. There was
so obviously nothing he could do. Just as his other disappointment had
given him his first stinging impression of the irony of life, that
cunningly builds a hope and then smashes it; so now he felt for the first
time something of the helplessness of man in the current or his destiny,
driven by deep-laid desires he seldom understands, and ruled by chances he
can never calculate. From love a man learns life in quick and painful
flashes.
Through the open window came the din of the New York street—purr and throb
of innumerable engines, rumble and clatter of iron wheels, tapping of
thousands of restless feet, making a blended current of sound upon which
floated and tossed the shrillness of police whistles and newsboys’ voices
and auto horns. It had been the background of his life during memorable
days. Once it had stirred his pulses, seeming a wild accompaniment to the
song of his passion. Now it wearied him inexpressibly; it seemed to be
hammering in his ears; he wanted to get away from it. He would go home
that day.
As always on his trips across the continent he sat apathetically smoking
through the wide green lushness of the middle west. Only when the
cultivated lands gave way to barren hills and faint blue mountains peeping
over far horizons did he turn to the window and forget his misery and his
weariness. How it spoke to his heart, this country of his own! He who
loved no man, who had gone to women with desire and come away with
bitterness, loved a vast and barren land, baking in the sun. The sight of
it quickened his pulses, softened and soothed his spirit. Like a good
liquor it nursed and beautified whatever mood was in him. When he had come
back to it a year before, it had spoken to him of hope, its mysterious
distances had seemed full of promise and hidden possibility. And now that
he came back to it with hopes broken, weary in mind and body, it seemed
the very voice of rest. He thought of long cool nights in the mountains
and of the lullaby that wind and water sing, of the soothing monotony of
empty sunlit levels, of the cool caress of deep, green pools, of the sweet
satisfaction that goes with physical weariness and a full belly and a bed
upon the ground.
But when on the last morning of his journey he waked up within a hundred
miles of home, and less than half that far from his own mountain lands,
his new-found comfort quickly changed to a keen anxiety. For he saw at a
glance that the country was under the blight of drought. The hills that
should have borne a good crop of gramma grass at this time of the year, if
the rains had been even fair, were nothing but bare red earth from which
the rocks and the great roots of the _pinion_ trees stood out like the
bones of a starving animal. Here and there on the hillsides he could see a
scrubby pine that had died, its needles turned rust-red—the sure sign of a
serious drought.
During the half month that he had been gone he had thought not once of his
affairs at home. The moment had absorbed him completely. Now it all came
back to him suddenly. When he had left, the promise of the season had been
good. It had not rained for more than a week, but everyone had been
expecting rain every day. It was clear to him that the needed rain had
never come. And he knew just what that meant to him. It meant that he had
lost lambs and ewes, that he would have no money this year with which to
meet his notes at the bank. He sank deep in despair and disgust again. Not
only was the assault on his fortunes a serious one, but he felt little
inclined to meet it. He was weary of struggle. He saw before him a long
slow fight to get on his feet again, with the chance of ultimate failure
if he had another bad year.
The Mexicans firmly believe, in the face of much evidence to the contrary,
that seven wet years are always followed by seven dry ones. He had heard
the saying gravely repeated many times. He more than half believed it. And
he knew that for a good many years, perhaps as many as six or seven, the
rains had been remarkably good. He was intelligent, but superstition was
bred in his bones. Like all men of a primitive type he had a strong
tendency to believe in fortune as a deliberate force in the affairs of
men. It seemed clear to him now, in his depressed and exhausted condition,
that bad luck had marked him for its prey.